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Andelain
, looking breath-takingly lovely, as ever.]] Lying in the midst of the Center Plains, bordered by the Andelainian Hills (sheesh, Steve...imagination failure?) and by the time of the Third Chronicles surrounded by the new forest of Salva Gildenbourne, Andelain symbolizes the true heart of the Land. Description Andelain is this fantasy realm's equivalent of Ghibli Hills. A region of heartstring-tugging natural beauty, it features gently rolling hills and lush grassy plains, crystal-clear chuckling streams and blue limpid pools, majestic gilden trees and a huge variety of multicolored wild flora, gambolling fluffity bunnies and prettily prancing unicorns etc etc. Okay maybe not quite, but it is sickeningly cutesey, a bit like the Land's version of Disneyland™. Andelain is loved by all of the Land's goodly inhabitants and equally detested by any malign entities. It is home to the Wraiths, those floaty little wisps of living flame. A word of warning: Do not let Giant couples enter this demesne, in particular if their task is to guard some humans. They will only wander off into the bushes starry-eyed, and spend the rest of eternity playing hide-the-boa, causing minor earthquakes in their throes of passion. Puissance Andelain has its own innate magicks. It is invariably the Land's last bastion of Earthpower, standing immune to all the depradations of Lord Foul and his various fell minions - although, despite the Sleeping Beauty-ish efforts of various cute woodland creatures, it was invaded by a wedge of ur-viles in the First Chronicles, a thing which led directly to the death of the oft-stoned Unfettered One that lived there. The walls between life and death run thin within the borders of Andelain and often have heroes gone there at night to meet their dead. Not in the least in a CSI tour round the morgue sort of way - instead the spirits of those important within the life of the quester who are now deceased will appear before him or her and offer counsel, or on very rare occasions even a gift. Guardians Andelain is guarded in times of need by both its wraiths and by the local animal wildlife, as stated above. Unfortunately, this level of protection is next to useless, a) because the wraiths are completely incapable of doing anything other than bobbing about purposelessly (and are viewed by ur-viles as a tasty amuse-bouche) and b) because let's face it, a couple of badgers, a weasel or two, a fox and a brace of bunnies are invariably going to get minced by any halfway competent bunch of Bad Guys™. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that Andelain has also been warded for most of its existence by a Forestal. Its original guardian eons ago was known as The Magister, but he passed from the earth long before the time of the First Chronicles. More recently, Hile Troy, having been transformed into the Forestal Caer Caveral by grumpy old Caerroil Wildwood after having spent a few centuries magically transmogrified into a tree-stump and thus learning about plant care, took the job on until his subsequent self-sacrificing death at the end of the Second Chronicles. By the end of the Third Chronicles, Caerwood ur-Mahrtiir, himself another Forestal created by the apparently prolifically progenitive Wildwood, has assumed the role of preserving Andelain and indeed the flora of the entire Land, aided and abetted to a dubious degree by those eager apprentice gardeners, the transmuted remnants of the surviving ur-viles and waynhim. The Final Scenes //Spoilers// Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its nature as the very quintessence of all that is natural and lovely about the Land, Andelain features as the scenery backdrop to the Epilogue of the Last Chronicles. The very final scenes of the ten volume magnum opus are played out here, with Covenant, Linden and Jeremiah having just remade the world with their suddenly new-found godlike powers. From the descriptive purple prose used, some have suggested that they may have radically overdone the cutesey Disney-esque factor when repairing Andelain, but others insist that this opinion is churlish. We'll let people make up their own minds by comparing the pictorial evidence given here. Category:Locations of the Earth Category:The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Category:The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Category:The Third Chronicles of Thomas Covenant